Friday, January 4, 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Proposes Massive Tax Hike on the Wealthy

The 29-year old congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who just took office, says tax rates for the nation’s wealthiest should increase to as much 70 percent to fund a new initiative to combat climate change — even if that means she’s labeled a “radical.”
“If that’s what radical means, call me a radical,” she said in an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” that will air in full on Sunday.

“That is the goal. It’s ambitious,” she said. “It’s going to require a lot of rapid change that we don’t even conceive as possible right now. What is the problem with trying to push our technological capacities to the furthest extent possible?”

The plan could include “an element where people are going to have to start paying their fair share in taxes.”

“You know, you look at our tax rates back in the ’60s, and when you have a progressive tax rate system, your tax rate let’s say from zero to $75,000 may be 10 percent or 15 percent, etc.,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

“But once you get to the tippy-tops on your 10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent,” she continued. “That doesn’t mean all $10 million are taxed at an extremely high rate. It means that as you climb up this ladder, you should be contributing more.”

The current top tax rate is 37 percent.

When “60 Minutes” host Anderson Cooper described her ideas as a “radical agenda,” she responded, “I think that it only has ever been radicals that have changed this country.”

Like I said, this gal is very dangerous and she has a following.

She is logic and facts challenged but that has never been a problem for the left in the past. For example, her claim of much higher taxes in earlier decades fails to take into account that there were many more loopholes that allowed almost everyone to escape the higher taxes. And she talks about climate change as though she actually knows something about it.

That said, when it comes to political strategy, she is a skilled Leninist. I mean, two days into office and she is featured on "60 Minutes" that should tell you a lot. There are 101 new freshman members of the House of Representatives but she gets the nationwide coverage. Not good.

3 comments:

── Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who just took office says tax rates for the nation’s wealthiest should increase to as much 70 percent to fund a new initiative to combat climate change — even if that means she’s labeled a “radical.”──

Never mind being called a 'radical'. What kind of climate change-combating policiesdoes she think need to be funded with those taxes, assuming the rich don't simply hide their money from her grabby little hands? So far the few policy recommendations floating around that have any sort of support from economists are a combination of carbon taxes, tax incentives for so-called "renewable" energy sources and a carbon credit market, all of which reek of cronyism but sound better focused and argued than Ocasio-Cortez's simplistic tax-the-rich-to-combat-climate-change scheme. Rather than a radical, I would call her a crank.

"It means that as you climb up this ladder, you should be contributing more."

It seems like in the 1960s and 1970s there might have been interviewers (Donahue? Buckley?) who would push her on the use of "should," by asking her what principle justifies this, and pushing further on that too. Today's interviewers seem mostly bereft of intellectual heft (what a rhyme!).

This gal is dangerous. She seems to have connected with the fact that the public will believe a politician if said politician says something factually, logically, and historically incorrect, but says it with conviction. I wouldn't be surprised to see AOC's fans, which are numerous and span far beyond NY's 14th Congressional District, using her comments to call for significantly higher taxes in the name of saving the planet.